Whereas I had an idea. And instead of immediately dreaming about how to make that dream a reality (like the fully automated robotic restaurant), I instead whip up a concept animation, so I can show it to people and they can say “why would you ever want to make something like that?”, instead of having to explain it to them and then have them say “why would you ever want to make something like that?”

The concept? Oh, right, the concept: a light that has no external features. You shake it to turn it on, shake it again to turn it off: it uses a capacitive sensor to tell if the shaking is done while a hand is holding it (example: in the video, the light hits the table, but it doesn’t switch). It uses an inductive charger. I know, it’s very Apple-esque of me, but I’m taken by their simple designs: it might not be the best idea for a complex machine like a computer, but simple rules for simple objects seems like a pretty good idea.

Making of

I just threw together everything with Blender 2.55/56, using Bassam’sMancandy rig. Mancandy doesn’t exactly work with 2.5x, but someone ported it over far enough that it works. You should NOT take my blender files as an example to follow: heck, even I know there are problems, and you would be better off watching the blender videos here than studying my animation. Everything else (environment, props) is really simple and hence of no note, as you can see in the…